{"id":544,"date":"2009-02-17T11:48:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-17T15:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/washwords.com\/words\/2009\/unsilencing-the-silence-through-words\/"},"modified":"2009-02-17T10:17:54","modified_gmt":"2009-02-17T14:17:54","slug":"unsilencing-the-silence-through-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/washwords.com\/words\/2009\/unsilencing-the-silence-through-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Unsilencing the Silence through Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

My amazingly talented “bloggy friend” (one of many, wow you people are amazing) Maggie Dammit<\/a> is deciding to use her talent for good. She’s using her writing, to help those who may feel they’ve lost their voices, are afraid to raise them loudly enough, speak out. She has created <\/p>\n

Violence UnSilenced<\/a> and I’ll let her tell you more herself:<\/p>\n

\nThe day I announced I\u2019d be starting a domestic violence blog, I signed up for two Google alerts. Any time the words \u201cdomestic violence\u201d and \u201cmurder suicide\u201d appeared in the national news, I wanted to know about it. At the time I wasn\u2019t exactly sure what this new blog would be, and I thought the alerts would be a good start, a practical way to stay up to date on blogworthy news items. I thought it would give me ideas. I expected a handful of emails and a truckful of inspiration.<\/p>\n

But from day one my inbox was bombarded. In fact, I was so overwhelmingly inundated by domestic violence and sexual assault related emails that I had to cancel the alerts to preserve my sanity. I\u2019m not gonna lie; I felt very discouraged and small. I felt like this was a mistake. I knew this was a huge issue, but I\u2019d never really looked at the prevalence of violence on a day-to-day basis and it blew my mind. Frankly, it delayed this project for a while. After all, who the hell am I?<\/p>\n

I am not an expert. I am not an educator. I am not a counselor. I\u2019m just a woman hobbled by an old experience, a journalist inspired by a story, and a blogger \u2014 and that\u2019s when it sunk in. I\u2019m a blogger who has been touched and astounded by the power of this community over the past two years. I know what it can do.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s something.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m starting small, and I\u2019m sticking to what I know. My vision for this site is to bring the survivor stories of other bloggers to you with the hope that you will see yourself, or your brother, or your daughter, or your neighbor, in their words. With the hope that you will feel safe enough and inspired enough to chime in. With the hope that by the telling and the listening we will all be better people. I know what you people are capable of. I\u2019m here to collect and disseminate your stories of abuse. I\u2019m here to ask you to tell them, to hear them, and to spread the word.<\/p>\n

Sure, I still want big things. I want to make a difference. I want to \u2018be the change.\u2019 I want to spark awareness and I want to reach you through your computer screen and I want to shake you and show you either that you are not alone, or that you are blind to what is all around you. I have such high hopes. But every big thing needs a beginning. This is ours.<\/p>\n

Here is what I\u2019m asking you to do.<\/p>\n

1. SPEAK OUT: Tell your story. Read this, and email me at maggie [at] violenceunsilenced [dot] com with questions.<\/p>\n

2. TAKE THE PLEDGE: Read the stories of your fellow bloggers. Subscribe to the feed, grab a badge for your sidebar, and add ViolenceUnSilenced to your blogroll and I\u2019ll return the favor on the pledge page.<\/p>\n

3. SPREAD THE WORD: Share this post in your Reader, Twitter it, Stumble it, Kirtsy it, Digg it, whatever it is you Internet savvy folks do. There are gazillions of personal blogs out there, and one in four women share this experience. I\u2019d venture to guess a hell of a lot of men do, too.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So for Maggie, and for those who feel silenced, help begin the unsilencing, the using of words for good, the telling of stories to raise a sound, a noise, a voice that won’t be silenced. Thanks.<\/p>\n

Powered by ScribeFire<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My amazingly talented “bloggy friend” (one of many, wow you people are amazing) Maggie Dammit is deciding to use her talent for good. She’s using her writing, to help those who may feel they’ve lost their voices, are afraid to raise them loudly enough, speak out. She has created Violence UnSilenced and I’ll let her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[898,622],"tags":[1047,285,1054,1053,1049,1055,1056,1050,1048,1051,1052],"class_list":["post-544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bonus-material","category-words","tag-domestic-violence","tag-help","tag-helping-hands","tag-maggie-dammit","tag-murder-suicide","tag-safety","tag-shelter","tag-story-telling","tag-violence","tag-writing-for-good","tag-writing-talent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/washwords.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/washwords.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/washwords.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/washwords.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/washwords.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/washwords.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":545,"href":"https:\/\/washwords.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions\/545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/washwords.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/washwords.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/washwords.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}